Plenty Of Water In Moon Rocks

The lunar landscape is not as dry and dusty as previously thought, according to the study of a sample collected by Apollo 14.

A dry and dusty world? It seems that not as much as we thought. Perhaps there are no lakes or oceans, or even a small puddle, but on the surface of the moon is water and as widespread as in the volcanic systems on Earth. A team of geologists from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) , and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville (USA) has found hydroxyl groups, ie water in a rock collected from the lunar surface by the astronauts of Apollo 14 . The study is published this week in the journal Nature .

“The Moon, which is generally believed devoid of material water, have water,” said John Eiler, co-author and professor of geochemistry at Caltech. The team found water in a mineral calcium phosphate, apatite, within a basalt collected from the surface of the moon by astronauts of Apollo 14 in 1971. To be precise, they found no water, the H2O molecule, but hydrogen in the form of a hydroxyl anion. “The hydroxide is a chemical very close to water”, explains researcher George Rossman, co-author and professor of mineralogy. “If you heat the apatite hydroxyl ions break down and go like water.” The elements found in the basalt show a chemical and geological relationship between the Earth and its natural satellite closer than thought so far
Unlike the lunar dew, which is thought to come from an external source such as solar wind, which brings the hydrogen and put him in contact with oxygen from the moon, water discovered now scientists have a different origin. But how it got there remains a mystery.